The Inconvenience of Truth
Watched Al Gore's inconvenient truth a couple of evenings ago. While the science he presents seems to be taken straight out of my 4th year climate change geography class, what I found particularily interesting is his assertion that controversy and disagreement exists not within the scientific community, but within popular media. The IPCC isn't quite the fringe group of radically liberal leaning scientists that some would suggest. The science comes from the work of hundreds of scientists in over 100 countries. While I think Gore has his own political motivation and deliberately glosses a few issues while leaving others entirely unmentioned, the evidence of big change is there - the writing is on the wall, so to speak in facebook terms.
The sliver of doubt concerning mankind's hand in the change we're witnessing seems to be justified reason for putting off action of any sort. In this arm-chair geographer's opinion, Earth's natural feedback systems will take over nicely once the tipping point has been reached, trumping any hope of reversing our impact. Once that happens, what we do really wont matter. Cars have been around for less than a century in history, and we are having this insurmountable crisis in imagining a way humans can exist without them. The tax of civilization seems to be the inability to save ourselves.
Listening to a lot of different music these days, but this song puts the message quite nicely:
"It's a matter of prescience - No, not the science fiction kind - It's all about ignorance, and greed, and miracles for the blind. The media parading, disjointed politics. Founded on petrochemical plunder, and we're its hostages! If you stand to reason you're in the game. The rules might be elusive but our pieces are the same - and you know if one goes down we all go down as well.
The balance is precarious as anyone can tell.
Don't allow this mythologic hopeful monster to exact its price.
We can't do nothing and think someone else will make it right."
- Bad Religion
